Fortune Favors the Bold, An alternative to XP for GP

In the old days I would give experience points (XP) to players for good role-playing and, generally, success in adventures, not specifically for gathering treasure or defeating foes. That was in line with the common practice for practically all games besides D&D, a game that gradually diminished in importance across the gamersphere during the years I'd been playing ('80s through the mid-'90s) until I stopped playing for a few decades.

It's worth emphasizing, in 2020, when the attention of gamers seems to be overwhelmingly focused on one version of D&D or another, that most role-playing games--those hundreds of other games--don't give XP for treasure or killing per se. So my way of doing this in the days of old was perfectly normal and mainstream.

Now that I'm back to running role-playing games, and coming to terms with a world full of gamers most of whose attention, if not their entire practical experience, seems to be limited to finely-grained variations in D&D, I've moved even farther away from the D&D rules. I see little reason to use XP at all. The fun of the game is its own reward. Characters just advance gradually as I call it. When a Chapter is done, each character gets a little advance. If it's Fifth Edition, then characters just go up a level after every so many three-hour sessions. A rule of thumb is that you go up a level after a number of sessions equal to your current level. That's not a hard and fast rule. If you play short sessions (90 minutes), double the number of sessions needed to ascend. My kids, who play, don't get bored this way, which is important. If you have older gamers who want a harder slog, simply increase the number of sessions required to gain a level.

But if it's my non-D&D home rules, the light rule-set fashioned by my preferences, then the game is designed to give a little advance to a stat at the end of every session, provided your character did stuff. Even failing can lead to improvements, as in life. But there is slow, gradual, nevertheless palpable, low-fantasy advancement every time you play a three-hour session.

My case for ditching XP entirely, even from a D&D-style game, is that the Referee is already stocking adventures, be they dungeons or whatever, in advance, and in effect is distributing the range of XP available already. Referees already secretly plan how fast PC advancement should be. Just let them advance as you planned and cut the accounting. The players definitely need to come up with adequate motivations for their characters in the adventure at hand rather than XP itself. In my view, this is a matter of player skill.

But many friendly commentators said, in response to my notes, that giving XP for gold pieces (GP) in value recovered creates a fun feeling of treasure-hunting excitement.

Was I missing out?

I decided to try to tie the treasure hunt into game mechanics to incentivize that kind of play to see what happened. I just had to do it in a way that did not tie character ability improvement in wizardry or swordsmanship or languages or some other skill to the number of gold pieces a character found. The reason I could not do it that way is that it makes so little sense that it basically ruins it for me.

The solution I devised, to play around with, is a rule with a name: Fortune Favors the Bold.

In my home game, each player character has a Luck stat. It works basically just the same as the one in Fighting Fantasy, which is a heavily modified version of the original Luck stat from the original Tunnels & Trolls. If you are not familiar with it, see what I wrote here.

In my game, Luck is a finite resource. The more your Luck is tested, the more it runs out. And you can even rely on it voluntarily, hoping it will help you in a pinch. But gradually, as you encounter hazard after hazard, it slips away. Your Luck can run out.

Other games that use this Luck mechanic just restore points after a night of sleep or between adventures. The rule Fortune Favors the Bold says that you don't get any lost Luck points back without meeting goals of the adventure.

I'm running a necessarily modified and re-statted version of Gillespie's Barrowmaze megadungeon to test this out. There is one goal in this adventure: getting treasure. The Fortune Favors the Bold rule here means that each substantial treasure the players find leads to the restoration of one spent point of Luck at the end of the session.

Substantial is a relative term. Right now they're mucking about the parts of the Barrowmaze that have been picked over already by earlier tomb-robbers, so even finding a purse of coins is important to them. This is especially so because I've slashed the quantities of treasure in each find-spot, reflecting the greater purchasing power of coins in my setting as compared with most D&D worlds.

But here's another catch: If the characters don't really try to find the grave goods they set out to get, Fortune herself will turn her back on them: I take a Luck point away, to be restored only when bolder behavior appears--but their survival gets more precarious with a lower Luck score!

Fortuna, in my setting, is the goddess of adventurers. Indeed, she favors the bold. But it does not actually matter here whether Luck is really the favor of a spirit, or a goddess, or a subtle matter of reflexes, or narrative sense, or a collection of various intangibles. The Luck score and the mechanic itself comprise a meta-game trait, so tying meta-game goals like collecting treasure with a meta-game trait works fine for me. At least, I find it more palatable than allowing treasure to bestow power-ups, as it works in traditional D&D.

(Getting treasure for greedy characters is an in-character goal. In that way the motivation to get treasure is not a meta-game trait. But compelling players to drive their characters to get treasure: that is a meta-game concern. And an abstract Luck stat is a concern of the player, not of the character.)

In my game, the Referee must declare at the beginning of the session what kinds of actions count as Bold for the rule to work. If reaching a milestone counts as Bold, then you need to achieve that to restore Luck. If defeating foes is Bold, then likewise. My family, who are testing this rule in a scenario based on a treasure hunt, feel the pressure not to give up in a session that has turned up little treasure. They know that their next excursion into the Barrowmaze may not be so fortunate (because of their reduced Luck scores) if they don't make progress or if they pass up the possibility of finding treasures so as not to risk their skins. It's all about incentivizing risk and making sure the players refuse to allow their characters to come home empty-handed.

Give it a try and let me know how it works for you.

What's that you say? You don't have a Luck stat in your game? Well, you may have saving throws. Try this: every time a character makes a saving throw, whether it's successful or not, then make the next one cumulatively harder by one. At the end of the session, instead of giving power-ups for treasure (XP for GP), allow them to reduce their accumulated saving throw penalties. I guarantee you that if they know this is how it works, they will be strongly motivated to keep exercising their character and take the kinds of risks that we all want to see them take in an adventure game.

Audentes fortuna adiuvat!